Don't look back in anger, leave a Google review
I am fuelled mostly by rage and cold and flu medicine by this point in our journey.
This newsletter comes to you from the past. I started writing it on the Isla del Sol, on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, wearing all the clothes I slept in: hiking socks, jogging bottoms, a t-shirt, a thermal top, a sweatshirt and a hat. After venturing out into the garden for breakfast I am back under the covers – we’re at 4,000m above sea level and it is absolutely bloody freezing. I am also laden with cold and cough once again, having already guzzled all the medical supplies brought over to us by Alice from the UK a few days ago. Bring out your tiny violins.
My congested face asides, it is very beautiful here, and even from Bed Office I have a view over the lake – pristine, still, not a whisper from any other boat or human – and the snow-capped Calzada mountain peak beyond it. It’s very peaceful. In fact it’s the first time I’ve been somewhere quiet enough to hear my own tinnitus for a while, because our travels over the past week have been plagued by national celebrations.
During our final week in Peru, we endured independence day festivities on July 28th (a general boo to the Spanish) and 29th (in honour of the armed forces and the national police service, apparently) – which seemed to involve a lot of music and partying through the day and night. But just in case we were hoping to catch up on sleep this side of the border, Bolivia’s own national days arrived right on time.
Leaving La Paz on Monday, we were delayed by parades to mark the beginning of a week’s celebrations for the national day of independence. And in Copacabana (Lake Titicaca) later that day, we arrived to find everyone gearing up for the festival of the Virgin of Copacabana, a religious mash-up that is pegged to the 5th of August, but apparently carries on being celebrated through much of the month. Thousands of pilgrims travel to Copacabana (which is the OG, by the way – the Brazilian beach was named after this one back in the 18th century) from across the Andes to gather in the town and on the shores of the lake to pay their respects to Mary (ie, Jesus’s mum) but with a fun mix of indigenous religious beliefs thrown in for good measure.
To give an example, a core activity for pilgrims visiting the lake is to get their cars blessed. All along the waterfront, families line up waiting by their vehicles for their slot with a shaman – presumably the ones around here are particularly reputable, given that this is the birthplace of the sun, according to Inca legend. Each family prepares their car by popping the bonnet and putting together a shrine, usually directly on the engine, usually featuring some small tokens such as toy cars and figurines of the Virgin Mary as gifts for Pachamama. Then, the shaman will perform a ceremony for the family, which from what we could see involves tipping out an alarming amount of coca-cola and beer around the car before setting off a few firecrackers for good measure. The family come away from the ceremony covered in fizzy liquids and glitter and with the promise of good fortune and reassurance that their journeys will go safely for another turn around the sun.
As the sun went down on our first night in Copacabana and we enjoyed a quiet pizza in town, it felt as if the revellers and market stall sellers were packing up for the night. But come 11pm, the real party began, as we should have expected after however many weeks in this part of the continent.
It started with singing. Then came the fireworks – so close to our hostel room that the windows rattled and we wondered for a moment if we were at war. I think the fireworks petered out by around 1.30am, but their absence made way for more parading, with a brass band and loudspeaker hogged by a preacher-cum-DJ/hype man. I woke myself up from coughing just as often, but when I looked at the clock at 4:43am the party was still going strong. Either I finally fell into a deeper sleep or the revellers paused to rest around 5am, but lo and behold the music started up again once the sun came up.
I don’t know how they do it. I’m a wreck and I wasn’t even out there in the cold. Peruvians are similarly stoic when it comes to their dedication to all-night religious raving, and I’ve concluded that they must be a nation of nappers. I’ve vented before about the general love of TikTok and disregard for headphones in Peru, but if you live in a region where the biggest semi-regular god-bothering parties take place through the night, I suppose you might well have a more relaxed attitude to bedtimes and a higher tolerance for loud music, both on the night bus and in daily life.
When Dave and I were staying by the beach in Máncora last month, we had an early start before beginning the five-day extravaganza across to Iquitos in the Amazon. It was about 1am and I couldn’t sleep because someone was playing music outside in the hotel courtyard, so I shuffled out of bed to find the source – a male guest playing some generic dance music on his phone – and ask him to cease. I was probably a bit blunt, but not rude. And he seemed surprised but apologetic. He said sorry, I said thank you. A minimal but efficient conversation in Spanish, or so I thought.
The following morning we checked out with no issues, said goodbye to the friendly enough, if slightly strange hotel staff, and ran to catch our first bus of many. Several days later in Iquitos when I got back online, I saw the review that Amparito, the hotel owner, had left of us:
“It bothered me that Rachael ordered another guest to turn off his music… I cannot deprive guests of hearing music at low volume.”
Weeks later, I’m still spitting with rage about it. It’s possible I’m still feeling a bit triggered from Potgate in Chile earlier this year. But in what world does the hotel owner side with the person making noise late at night?
I resisted arguing back publicly on the Airbnb app this time, reasonably confident that other users would read the review and think Amparito was off her rocker and not me. But obviously I couldn’t help starting a fight in the private messages, telling her I was surprised and disappointed (it’s always good to be “disappointed”) by her review, that the guy was playing his music neither quietly nor indoors, and that surely her priority as a host should be that her guests are able to get a good night’s sleep. She bit back and told me I had no right to “confront” other guests, to which I responded that was news to me since I didn’t realise we were staying in a prison.
We ended the conversation in disagreement, but I still maintain that I kept the moral high ground in not dissing her publicly on the internet, to paraphrase Destiny’s Child (until now, I guess. Oops.) I do think in this particular instance bitch be crazy, but I also realise it’s a cultural difference. Peru is just loud, and Peruvians seem to celebrate noise in a way that I can’t (ie, 24 hours a day). Maybe when Peruvians visit the UK, they find it uncomfortable and weird how much quieter and more insular we are, certainly on public transport.
It was fun to get a second bite at Lake Titicaca after our brief visit to the Peruvian side in May, and when I wasn’t coughing, sneezing and playing out scenes of confrontation between me and all my enemies in my head, I had a very relaxing time soaking up the colours and scenery.
In Copacabana, Dave, Alice and I climbed up Cerro Calvario, which was no joke at 4,018m altitude and made all the more harrowing by all the drunk Virgin worshippers hanging out at the top of the hill who were throwing down fireworks as part of their rituals.
After two nights in party land, we took a short boat ride over to the Isla del Sol. There, we mostly hung out by our charming if basic hostel and at the appropriately-named Pachamama café-restaurant, both of which were located right at the top of the island, which is one big hill. This was convenient for getting in maximum views with minimum movement for the two further days we stayed there, but hugely inconvenient upon arrival, when our boat driver kicked us off at the bottom of the island several kilometers’ hike away from the main settlement (and our hostel).
Sitting in Pit Stop café in Copacabana that morning, the town’s one inevitable gringo-magnet for its various French toast and soya-milk coffee options (I wasn’t complaining) Alice and Dave had been discussing the logistics of us getting to Yumani and up the big scary hill where our hostel was located. Fortunately they were interrupted by a know-it-all American dude who told them that actually there were plenty of donkeys on the island that would meet us off the boat and take our heavy bags up the steep path for us for a small fee. Entrepreneurial donkeys!
Except when we arrived on the island, admittedly very far from where we’d expected to be, the only donkeys in sight were very clearly off-duty, with no handlers to be seen. I tried to negotiate with one of them but it was no use, he was high on hay and free will. We had no choice but to climb the big hill (it’s basically a mountain, I’m going to say mountain) with our 15kg backpacks, because we’re all serial over-packers and in the words of a very scary German hostel owner I once met in Belize, “that you chose to carry such a burden is nobody’s fault but your own”.
My second high-altitude hike in as many days was particularly tough going given all the phlegm I was hacking up, but we made it with minimum fuss or tantrums. When a French woman stopped Alice at the beginning of the first ascent to tell her that actually, “it’s much better to leave your luggage in Copacabana before coming to the island”, Alice didn’t even push her off the side of the hill to her death which I thought was admirable.
This is the point in the story where normally I’d round it off in a jolly way by telling you we all had a rewarding dinner and skipped merrily off to our beds, but actually the restaurant we went to was terrible and we were subject to almost two hours’ of psychological bullying by the 14-year-old waitress who refused to bring our food or drinks, and yes, I was so incensed by the experience that I left a bad review on Google. But hey, you can’t have it all. Anyway, it’s good for me to keep some rage in the system to maintain my natural equilibrium.
Travel bits and tips from this week
From La Paz, we took a bus from the main terminal in La Paz to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, which at one point involved crossing the water at San Pablo de Tiquina on a two-minute ferry for a couple of Bolivianos (20p) while watching the bus wobble across on a separate raft and meeting it on the other side. You can stay on the bus if you want to, but they do topple overboard from time to time – and having watched the process I can fully believe it.
In Copacabana we stayed at Mia Posada Copacabana, a one-star hotel that was comfortable enough but very strange in vibes. The manager tried to get us to pay in dollars, despite Booking.com promising otherwise, and when we refused he charged us a slightly higher rate. It’s not uncommon for this to happen in Bolivia when you’re booking somewhere that’s not payable online in advance – being charitable I suspect it’s because the local currency is unstable with the current economic situation, but really people do just want dollars if they can get them and will attempt to fight you for them.
We ate a pizza at Restaurant La Fortaleza del Sabor and had breakfast and several fancy coffees at Pit Stop (what can I say, I loved it).
Dave and Alice sampled some local beers from the sunny balcony of Coffee Bar Taipi Uta while I snotted into a cup of tea. The bar had a great view of the car blessing ceremonies, as did…
…the trout shack we ate lunch at on the beach. There are about 20 identical places along there by the port,
all selling the same menu (trout) so we picked one at random (I think it was number 7?) and it was excellent.
For dinner that night we went to Sapori d’Italia, a cute little Italian place. Like everywhere in Copacabana, the building was absolutely freezing and the service was eccentric, but the pasta was hearty and the red wine kept us warm.
On the Isla del Sol, we stayed at Hostal Tawri, which was run by a sweet woman called Yola who made us banana pancakes every morning.
The hostel was a short walk from the main “strip”, ie, a handful of very quiet restaurants at the top of the hill. One such restaurant was called View Point and it was terrible. We’re all emotionally scarred by the experience. Another was Pachamama and that was bloody great.